MOVIE REVIEW: Morris documentary is deft portrait of the artist behind the camera

Friday

Jul 14, 2017 at 6:30 AM

"The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography," focuses on a Cambridge woman who spent a lifetime behind the lens.

By Al Alexander/For The Patriot Ledger

The beauty of photographs is that they accurately capture a moment in time. As the years pass, the image remains the same, serving as a precious memento of our youth, our friends, our family, and most importantly the people we’ve loved who’ve moved on to other places – and other incarnations. The pictures are a source of joy, but more so, melancholy, as they remind us of where we were, how we felt and how we’d love to go back to that time and place to feel then what we feel now. All of that inherent emotion is vividly on display in the latest remarkable work by Cambridge filmmaker Errol Morris. It’s titled “The B-Side,” but it’s entirely A-side stuff, as the camera turns its focus on a woman who spent a lifetime behind the lens.

Her name is Elsa Dorfman, a portrait photographer by trade and an eyewitness to a 1960s counterculture whose thick vein of rebellion ran straight through her beloved Harvard Square. That’s where the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin, Anne Sexton and Bob Dylan took time out from changing the world to pose for Dorfman at both her Flagg Street studio and her original Cambridge hangout at the legendary Grolier bookstore. She’s 80 now, but still sharp as a knife; her memory keen, which makes it all the sadder that technology has robbed her of her trademark canvas – Polaroids. Yes, Polaroids, those old self-developing gadgets that produced pictures in the time it took to aim, shoot, shake and peel.

It’s been Dorfman’s medium for decades. So when Cambridge-based Polaroid Corp. filed for bankruptcy a few years back, it also announced it would no longer produce film for instant cameras, essentially ending Dorfman’s career as an artist. What a loss it is, too, as Morris reveals in the space of 75 riveting minutes set almost entirely in the intimate confines of Dorfman’s cramped shop at 955 Mass. Ave. Inside are file cabinets overflowing with snippets of history, much of it shot with her favorite camera, the rare (only five were ever made) 20-by-24-inch Polaroid, which produced both a unique look and a rich, life-like texture. Many of the shots are of Ginsberg, her late close friend, but far more portray everyday families who posed for her in her studio. Because the special film required for the 20-by-24 camera was cost prohibitive, Dorfman would take only two photos, one that the buyer selected, the A-side, and the one they rejected and she kept, the B-side – thus, the film’s title.

What we watch unspool is typical of Morris and his uncanny ability to get people as guarded as defense secretaries Robert McNamara (“The Fog of War”) and Daniel Rumsfeld (“The Unknown Known”) to open up and chew on their triumphs as well as their failures. But it’s also radically different in that this time he asks few questions of his subject. Instead he just asks Dorfman to stand before the camera and to talk as if talking to a friend, which Morris has been to her for decades.

The mood is light and breezy, with Dorfman being as funny as she is candid. But there’s an inescapable air of sadness lurking beneath the surface, especially when the subject turns to her compadre Ginsberg, who died 20 years ago, yet for her, it seems like yesterday. His many portraits, which she shot between their first meeting in 1959 well into the 1990s, are what you’ll come away remembering most, particularly my favorite in which she overlaid a full-frontal nude of the Beat poet atop a straight suit-and-tie shot of him. It’s striking, not just because of the contrast but for how it makes an ideal metaphor for a writer who made a career out of baring his soul. Both shots were taken with another experimental Polaroid, the 40-by-80, which is a tad bigger than life-size. And it’s because of the enormous magnitude that the dual portrait is so haunting.

If the many name drops give you the impression the movie is a quasi-ad for Polaroid, don’t let it. If anything, Dorfman is a tiny bit miffed that the corporation never really gave her the due she deserved, making her pay rental fees for the experimental cameras and charging her for the film she used, costs she was somewhat embarrassed to pass on to her customers. Yet she feels indebted to the company, whose world headquarters were just around the corner on Memorial Drive. And some of the archival photos of the joint – and it’s now a ghost town of a factory – are a fine source of nostalgia.

And speaking of photography, kudos go out to Morris’ cameraman, Nathan Swingle, who does a wonderful job of breathing life into what easily could have become static scenes of Dorfman pulling portraits out of their storage cabinets and talking about the prints and the anecdotes behind them. Swingle gives it all a rich texture, particularly late in the film when his camera glides over hundreds of Dorfman’s regular-sized Polaroids of people who’ve had the privilege to sit for her. Enhancing the visuals is a terrific soundtrack by Paul Leonard-Morgan that perfectly matches the film’s bittersweet mood.

It’s an evocative portrait of a portraitist who takes us magically back in time via her photos. And the thing that ties them all together is the surprise on the face of an artist who is for the first time realizing how fast time has passed while she was busy having fun indulging her twin loves: photography and her family: son, Isaac, and husband, Harvey Silverglate. The irony is that her portrait is very much a mosaic pieced together from the thousands of photos she’s taken of others, making for a life, like a movie, that pass by in a snap. THE B-SIDE: ELSA DORFMAN’S PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY (R for some graphic nude images and brief language.) A documentary from Errol Morris featuring Cambridge photographer Elsa Dorfman. Grade: A-